California is accelerating its efforts to clear San Quentin’s death row with plans to transfer the last 457 convicted men to other state prisons by the summer.

The move comes five years after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that placed a moratorium on the death penalty and closed the prison’s execution chamber. It coincides with his broader initiative to transform San Quentin into a Scandinavian-style prison, with an emphasis on rehabilitation, education and vocational training.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the convicted general population inmates will be housed in 20 maximum-security state prisons, where they will have access to a broader range of rehabilitation programs and treatment services. The changes do not change their sentences or sentences.

The plan unveiled Monday builds on a pilot program that experimented with transferring 104 death row inmates between January 2020 and 2022.

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Seventy people on death row were transferred from Marin County’s storied men’s facility in the past month, CDCR said. The 20 convicted women incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla will remain there, but are housed in the general population.

The changes are partially consistent with Proposition 66, a statewide ballot measure passed in 2016 that allows convicted prisoners to be housed in facilities other than San Quentin, requiring them to work and pay 70% of their income to victims.

This transfer allows death row inmates to pay restitution through court-ordered work programs. Participants will be placed in facilities with an electrified secure perimeter while still integrating with the general population, CDCR Secretary Jeffrey Macomber said in a prepared statement.

But a primary goal of Proposition 66 was to speed executions by setting time limits on legal challenges and expanding the pool of attorneys authorized to represent death row suspects. In that same election, voters defeated a rival measure that would have abolished the death penalty.

By contrast, in 2019, when Newsom announced his moratorium on the death penalty, he vowed that no California inmate would be executed while in office, due to his belief that the death penalty is harmful.

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core discriminatory and unjust.

Even before Newsom’s moratorium, California executions had been on hold for years amid lawsuits over whether the state’s lethal injection process was cruel and unusual punishment. The last execution in California was in 2006. There are

now

644 convicts in California prisons.

Last year, Newsom announced plans to transform San Quentin, California’s oldest prison, into more of a rehabilitative center with job training, substance abuse and mental health programs.

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extended academic classes, a model of confinement more common in Scandinavian countries.

But death row inmates will not be admitted to the re-envisioned San Quentin. Outside of death row, the facility does not have the necessary security measures, including a “lethal electrified fence,” to house high-security inmates among the general population.

Newsom last year proposed $380 million to jump-start San Quentin’s overhaul and create an advisory board to implement his vision. But, faced with a looming budget deficit of more than $37 billion, lawmakers in both political parties, as well as the legislature’s nonpartisan finances, have

advisors advisors,

Questions have been raised about the scope and timing.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office recently recommended closing five prisons to reduce criminal justice spending, in addition to the two state prisons that the Newsom administration has already closed. Meanwhile, San Quentin’s advisory board recommended in January that some of the renewal money be spent on renovations that would more directly improve living conditions at the prison.